Circuit switching is a method of implementing a telecommunications network in which two network nodes establish a dedicated communications channel (e.g., circuit) through the network before the nodes may communicate. Packet switching is a digital networking communications method that groups all transmitted data into suitably sized blocks, called packets, which are transmitted via a medium that may be shared by multiple simultaneous communication sessions.
Second generation (2G) wireless technology uses circuit-switched networks and does not support packet switching. Third generation (3G) wireless technology uses a combination of circuit-switched networks and packet-switched networks. Fourth generation (4G) wireless technology and the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard use packet-switched networks and do not use circuit-switched networks.